One of the things we'd heard most from users is that you wanted to have greater control over what you see in your feed—whether it's separating out your family members' updates from your coworkers' or making sure you don't miss entries from a specific friend.

The new design offers friend lists to help you organize your subscriptions into groups. Now you can get updates from specific groups of people separately, or you can add an acquaintance to a list and remove them from your home feed.

There are lots of other improvements, such as being able to post photos directly to FriendFeed. We've also added a sidebar to improve navigation, making it easy for you to access your Friend lists and customize the Rooms you want to visit most often.

Finally, because everyone's FriendFeed experience is unique, we've added a way for you to view FriendFeed the way someone else does, with their feed and entries from all their subscriptions. You can use this feature by simply clicking the "[name] + Friends" tab on a person's profile page. For example, here's my FriendFeed. And here's Paul's.

I love using this feature to show my friends who are new to the service why I enjoy using FriendFeed so much — they get to see everything that's cool (that's public) that I see on my FriendFeed every day.

And one more thing...

Steve Jobs taught us no announcement would be complete without a compelling surprise to spice it up, so we are also launching one of our most-requested features today: duplicate detection.

When a popular story breaks, like the news about Wall Street this week, lots of people tend to share the same article. With this new noise-reducing FriendFeed feature, when multiple friends share the same link, the set of duplicate entries will only show up once in your feed:

We've heard lots of feedback from our users as we were testing out the new design, and we hope that this new version of FriendFeed will make it easier for you to read and customize your feed, and be fun to use too.

Many thanks to everyone who has taken the time to give us feedback on the design. As always, we're looking forward to your comments in the FriendFeed Feedback room.